Sunday, October 9, 2011

.NET: wddx.net library revision

Before web services, before JSON, before many other things or people ever thought about it, there was this other way to exchange data across platforms via the Internet using XML. It was called WDDX (Web Distributed Data Exchange).

WDDX (Web Distributed Data eXchange) is a programming-language-, platform- and transport-neutral data interchange mechanism to pass data between different environments and different computers. It supports simple data types such as number, string, boolean, etc., and complex aggregates of these in forms such as structures, arrays and recordsets (row/column data, typically coming from database queries).

Support for WDDX is available natively in several languages including ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, and Python. Other languages implement this through add ons. .NET belongs to the later category, thus needs a library to process WDDX. Unfortunately, this library has not seen updates in a long while. It is open source and was created by Joel Mueller early in the 2000s and not much happened since then.

First, Kudos for Joel taking on this project and making it available. It is well documented and executed; unfortunately, as with any software, there were some issues. Having discovered these and "fixed" them, the question of getting the fixes back into distribution came up. After several attempts to contact the current maintainer of this project and several months of wait time I got very frustrated and decided to take over some of this.

Rather than branching this on Microsoft Codeplex site (this is Microsoft's site for maintaining open source projects) I used Git Hub. The main reason for me to use another site for maintenance was that Codeplex seem to not get any attention from Microsoft. Bug messages were being ignored, documentation did not match to what the site did or operated.

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